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The New York Timesreported
Thursday that, after four months, it has expelled what it believes to be
China-based hackers from its computer system and has, so far, kept them from
breaking back in. The paper said a group had been "infiltrating its computer
systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees." The paper
linked the attacks to a Times investigation, published in
October, finding that the relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao "had
accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings."

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The
government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is quick to brand critics as
"terrorists," and that's one of the main reasons that Turkey was the world's
worst jailer of the press when CPJ conducted its recent census
of imprisoned journalists. This week, the prime minister and two pro-government
newspapers applied the label once again to critics, illustrating the extremely
difficult climate confronting any Turkish journalist who challenges official
positions.

In
the last year, CPJ has documented
a disturbing trend of attacks against the press in Tajikistan: the frequent
blocking orders that the State Communications Agency has issued to local
Internet service providers. Delivered in most instances via text message, the
orders urge the ISPs to block nationwide access to local and international news
websites that criticize President Emomali Rahmon and his authoritarian
policies, and publicize issues like widespread government corruption and rising
unemployment.

Lau Tzu once said:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In Nepal,
getting to that first step has been a tumultuous process. Tomorrow, a court in
the western district of Dailekh is expected to formally begin hearings in the
2004 murder case of journalist Dekendra Raj Thapa.

An increase in press freedom violations last year created a
surge of need among journalists, driving a record number of assistance cases
for CPJ's Journalist Assistance
Program in 2012. More than three-quarters of the 195 journalists who
received support during the year came from East
Africa and the Middle East and North
Africa, reflecting the challenges--including threats of violence and
imprisonment--of working in these repressive regions. Here are some of the highlights
of our work over the last year:

One
result of President Rafael Correa's high-profile campaign to demonize the
country's private media can be seen on the desk of José Velásquez, news manager
at Teleamazonas, a private Quito television station often critical of the
government. Among the documents piled high on his desk are lawsuits, which used
to be a rare thing. Encouraged by Correa, who has personally sued
newspapers and journalists, Velásquez says, the subjects of Teleamazonas news
reports are now filing between two and five lawsuits per month against the
station.

Black January commemorations in Colombo have become an annual
event. Tuesday's demonstration was the second. The protest aims to recall
the series of killings and attacks on journalists in Sri Lanka in recent years,
many of them occurring in Januaries past. All of them have gone untried and
unpunished, sustaining the country's perfect record
of impunity for those who want to silence media by murder.

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A small number of journalists reporting from Syria have
recently interviewed prisoners of war under highly coercive circumstances. In
doing so, they have ignored the protections that are due to prisoners under
international humanitarian law, or IHL.

Is Irina Khalip, the prominent Belarusian journalist, free
to travel? President Aleksandr Lukashenko, whose government prosecuted her on
bogus charges of creating mass disorder, says that she is. That Khalip has not,
the president said, shows that she would prefer to be known as a "victim of the
regime." Of course, this all seems strange considering that Khalip's sentence
requires her to be home by 10 p.m. daily.

On December 2, CPJ sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requesting an explanation for airstrikes on media facilities during the November 2012 military action in Gaza. The strikes damaged two media buildings and killed and injured a number of journalists. Israeli officials said the military targeted terrorist infrastructure, but provided no explanation of how such a determination was made.

The French army is often called la
Grande Muette, or "the Great Silent." The war in Mali confirms the French
military's well-deserved reputation of being secretive about front-line actions.
"Locking the information is more in the culture of the French army than of the
U.S. army," says Maurice Botbol, director of La Lettre du Continent. In the first two weeks of military operations
against Islamist militant groups in Mali, the French army has released only a blurry video of an air attack at an undisclosed location.

On the second anniversary of Egypt's January 25 revolution, Hosni
Mubarak's footprints are still present in many areas of the public sphere--and
media are no exception. President Mohamed Morsi needs to cease using Mubarak-era
tactics of silencing his critics with criminal charges such as defamation.

When the story is so important but the risks are so high, journalists must keep safety at the forefront of their thinking. That's especially true for freelancers who often do not have the support of a large news organization. Preparation, peer networking, and smart planning can help improve the odds of not only surviving hostile situations but succeeding in one's work.

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Three years ago, on January 24, 2010, columnist and cartoonistPrageeth Eknelygoda vanished
on his way to work to cover the final campaigning in Sri Lanka's bitterly
contested presidential election. He has not been heard from since. The pro-opposition
website he worked for, Lanka eNews, has been repeatedly
attacked,
its offices hit with arson, its staff arrested
and harassed,
its editor driven into exile in England.

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As pundits debate how Barack Obama will tackle guns, climate
change, immigration, and the debt ceiling in his newly inaugurated second term,
press freedom advocates are left questioning how the U.S. president will handle
another, no-less-controversial issue: the treatment of whistleblowers and
officials who leak information to the media.

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With Turkey recently in the spotlight because
of its press
freedom record--including dishonorable distinction as the world's
worst jailer of journalists--many international observers wonder how Ankara
will overcome its image crisis and whether it will choose to resolutely base
its broad strategic ambitions on the respect of global standards of press
freedom. A new report to be officially launched in Brussels tomorrow by Marc
Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Ankara and senior Turkey scholar at Carnegie
Europe and the Open Society Foundation, "Press
freedom in Turkey," underscores the importance of the issue. As Pierini
recently told CPJ, "What kind of state and of society does Turkey want to be?
To what league of nations does it want to belong?"

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Some news which appears to be good from China, and some that
isn't: Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup
Wangchen has been moved to a women's prison where conditions are not as
harsh, according to his friends and associates at the Switzerland based group
Filming for Tibet. They
say that Wangchen has been transferred to the Qinghai Provincial Women's
Prison, the main prison for women in China's Qinghai province. He had been
held at the Xichuan labor camp in Siling, in eastern Tibet.

What is the humanitarian function of journalism in wartime? How does international humanitarian law protect journalists? Why is impunity the most important challenge facing journalists working in conflict zones?

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At 8 o'clock Tuesday morning roughly 50 Burundian
journalists silently marched
around the courthouses in the capital, Bujumbura, and the offices of the
justice minister, protesting the imprisonment
of their colleague, Hassan
Ruvakuki.

"They sentenced him to three years without following the
law," said Patrick Nduwimana, one of the protest organizers and the interim
director of local private radio station Bonesha
FM. A week earlier, on Tuesday, January 8, an appeals court in Burundi had sentenced
Ruvakuki, a reporter for Bonesha FM and the French government-backed Radio France Internationale, to
three years imprisonment for "working with a criminal group."

Greek journalists are on the alert since
five small bombs exploded Friday on the doorsteps of the homes of several journalists
in Athens. Although the makeshift devices only damaged the buildings' entrances
and no one was hurt, the attacks appear to be warning shots in a tense social context
where journalists are increasingly in the firing line.

James
Foley, a U.S. freelance journalist, was abducted
in Syria in November. His colleague and friend Nicole Tung, a freelance
photographer, spoke to CPJ about
her experience working and traveling with Foley. A petition appealing for
Foley's release can be signed here.

January 11, 2013 1:44 PM ET

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I remember sitting with a Yahoo employee in 2009, talking
about the lack of protective encryption on Yahoo's Web mail accounts. Like
many, the employee had been caught up in the news of how Iranians were using the Internet to document and
protest the presidential elections in that country, and had grown worried about
the possibility of governments intercepting Yahoo customer's emails without due
process. As an immigrant from a repressive regime, he told me, he was aware of how
much danger this posed. He said he was going to raise the topic internally.

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There is cautious optimism among China media watchers this morning over the news
that a deal has been struck between censors and protesting
journalists at China's Southern Weekly
news magazine, which is also known as Southern
Weekend. The journalists will not face reprisals for their protest, and
propaganda authorities will not repeat the editing stunt (which transformed a
pro-reform New Year editorial into a tribute to the Communist Party) that sparked
the dispute, according to The Associated Press.

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Even though members of the Karnataka state government have
provided broad assurances that they will drop
charges against Naveen Soorinje, the young journalist remains imprisoned two months after
he was arrested for exposing an assault on women by Hindu extremists. Welcome
to Incredible India, where a journalist can be locked up for documenting a
crime against women even as millions express outrage over medieval mindsets
following the fatal gang rape of a Delhi student in December.

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In the past few days, Chinese journalists and their
supporters have launched startlingly direct opposition to Communist Party rule,
protesting a heavy-handed move by Guangdong's provincial propaganda department
to unilaterally replace
a SouthernWeekly editorial on constitutionalism with pro-Party bromides. Defying
censors' directives, media organizations around the country continue to post
messages of support of Southern Weekly
reporters who have gone on strike and called for the dismissal of provincial
propaganda chief Tuo Zhen. It is the 21st century equivalent of carrying placards
through Tiananmen Square.

Staffers at the Guangdong-based Southern Weekly magazine have publicly expressed their outrage
at the heavy handed intervention of propaganda officials who unilaterally rewrote
a New Year's editorial calling for improved constitutional rule in China. A
piece extolling the virtues of the Communist Party ran in its place. Sixty
staffers posted an open letter to the provincial government accusing propaganda
officials of "raping" the paper's editorial procedures, The
Associated Press reports. Apparently, the editorial was changed by censors after
the magazine had closed and was being readied for the printer. Staff did not
know of the changes until the piece appeared in print and online.

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The fleeting nature of YouTube's availability in Pakistan
this weekend--the site, which has been banned in the country since September,
was unblocked for a whole three minutes--is only the latest emblem of
Islamabad's erratic and confounding approach to Internet censorship. Those who
have been hoping for less opaque tactics apparently are in for disappointment.